Articles – Page 104

Morning Mysteries 1 – 1 Scatman Dan

I woke up this morning to two mysteries:

1. Why had I set my alarm for 8:30am?

2. Why do I have a nose bleed?

I’ve solved the former: Claire needs to move her car (which is parked on double-yellows outside) or she’ll get ticketed when the morning wardens come by (morning wardens? they’re like traffic wardens, but they put tickets on people who still look half-asleep). The latter? No idea.

Yay; we’re off to the Borth Animalarium today, to look at meerkats! Followed by Troma Night!

My ‘Online Bank’ project isn’t going very well. So far it allows you to add Books to a Cart and get the total cost of them all. Which isn’t terribly useful, because that sounds more like a bookstore to me than an online bank… but I couldn’t find an example online about how to use EJBs to make an online bank, just a bookstore. D’oh.

All Questions Answered

Have you seen AQA (All Questions Answered), a new online/SMS service? The idea is that you text message a question to 63336 (only on O₂, Vodafone, and Orange, right now: costs £1) and their server uses a clever combination of intelligent algorithms, data mining, and human researchers to provide you with an answer.

They’re working on the policy of ‘All Questions Answered’. It could make the Scholars pub quiz a little easier. =o)

Just Plain Weird; And Other Observations About The World

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[more of this post was recovered on Friday 24 November 2017]

This is just plain weird. How to perform a fecalectomy on a keyring.

I’ve got some damn cool new board games, including the second best one in the world, and another one in the top 100, according to the voters on BoardGameGeek. Paul, Claire and I played Hacker from Steve Jackson Games (the people behind Chez Geek and the inspiration for all those weird cards I’ve been posting to my blog). Later, Bryn, Paul, Claire and I played Carcassonne, a clever tile-laying game, and tonight, Claire and I played Tigres & Euphrates, another tile game. I’m rediscovering my love of board games, and slowly forcing it upon others as well. Bryn bought a copy of Risk, and Claire’s spent forever cutting all of the little pieces out…

Dissertation Hand-In

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

I handed in my dissertation yesterday. What a farce. Here’s the approximate order of things.

08:30 – Get up. Compile a postscript (.ps) copy of my dissertation, and upload both this and the .tex source files to central.aber.ac.uk. Start walking up to campus (Bryn offers to give me a lift, but I feel energetic, so I bound on up the hill).

09:00 – Reach campus and pay for £5 of printer credit (100 pages). Find a workstation room, log into central, and lpr -Puserarea diss-final.ps (print) it. Marvellous. Pick up the printout.

09:15 – Drop my (printed) dissertation off at the Library to be hardback bound. Everything’s going splendidly. Trek back down town. The hand-in window is 14:00-16:00, so I’ve got loads of time.

13:30 – Arrive back on campus, this time with two CDs (containing the source code and sample data for the project). I buy sticky things from the Union with which to attach them to the inside cover of my dissertation, and then trek to the Library to pick up the masterpiece.

13:45 – Hmm. The binding office seems to be closed. Guess they’re on lunch. I go to return a library book from the Physical Sciences Library, …

Update, 11 January 2020: As the tail-end of this post appears to be lost forever, I’ll fill in the essence of it from memory: after a leisurely morning/early afternoon of getting my dissertation printed and bound for delivery, well-ahead of the deadline later in the day and thus avoiding the mad rush for the printers and binders later in the day, I arrived at the hand-in point only to be told I was supposed to be handing over two copies, not one, and so I ended up caught up in the mad rush I’d been smugly avoiding after all.

Wargames As Public Acceptance

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[more of this post was recovered on Friday 24 November 2017]

There’s a lot of defence for wargames, as Command & Conquer: Generals to see how far this can be taken. In Generals (set in the near future), the United States unite with a (reluctant) China in order to suppress terrorism in (you guessed it) the Middle East. All sides have weapons of mass destruction, but the wording is clear: while the American WMDs are called “Superweapons” the Chinese have “Nuclear Weapons” and the arab states have “Biochemical Terror Weapons”. And that’s not all – the American soldiers all say things like “Doing the right thing,” and “Defending our people,” in true American Hero voices. Meanwhile, the other sides are made to sound insidious and crafty. The Armerican tanks have names like “Crusader” (yeh; let’s make a reference to Jerusalem, shall we?) and “Patriot”, while the global …

MY DISSERTATION IS DONE!

At long last, after many nights (and days) slog, my dissertation is done. Enormous thanks to everybody who provided feedback to the developmental copies (don’t make any more comments now, ‘cos I’ve “gone gold” with it). Tomorrow I hand it in and I’m rid of it forever, yay!!!

I’m actually not as happy with it as I’d like to be. There’s so much more that I wanted to do with it. But I’m over the word limit already and pruning out old stuff and shortening sentences is such hard work, and I don’t think I actually have time.

Still: I bet I’m the only person who submits their project on two CDs… <grins> If only size were everything.

I’ve also come to the conclusion that I’ve been an unbearable cunt over the last few days (mostly to Claire); a result of the heaps of stress at this work I’ve had to do (alongside everything else… as usual). I’m not usually one to let stress get to me, but there I was, snappy and irritable. Much apologies and backrubs owed, methinks.

But hey. It’s done.

Dissertation Proofreaders Needed

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

I’m looking for help proofreading my dissertation. If you’ve been invited to, or you’d like to help, please go to https://danq.me/diss/, download the latest version, and post any comments here.

You will need a password. To ensure that only invited parties can get hold of the password, you’ll need to prove your identity. The following groups are permitted to log in:

Members of Troma Night: go to the Troma Night web site and log in: the password will appear on the front page, underneath the words ‘Upcoming Events’.
People listed as LiveJournal friends of Fiona: go to this LiveJournal post by Fiona (you’ll need to be logged in and on her Friends list).
People who can guess the password – it’s the second half of the name of the project of my dissertation, in lower case, with the final letter replaced with the first vowel in the word that is the name of the logo of the organisation that benfits from my project.
Other …

Oh! You’re Going To Malawi? While You’re There, Pick Me Up Some AA Batteries…

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

As most of my readers will probably be aware, I’ll later this year be cycling around Malawi as a sponsored stunt with Cycle Tracks: “A Truly Charitable Bike Ride through a Truly Beautiful Country”. In any case; I’d never have thought that our group (11 of us) would be roped into so many other things while we were there.

Our team leader, Alistair, writes:

Eleven is also a fine number for a football team. So maybe at Phoka we could engage the local team in a game. Their handicap is that they are all under 12 and don’t wear boots. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be a walkover as we shall all be totally exhausted from cycling to Phoka and unable to walk never mind kick a ball.

You may be interested to know that we have been offered football strips, boots, footballs, gloves and goodness knows what else for the kids at Phoka. I haven’t figured out how I will get them out to Phoka. They are in 3 kit bags but I don’t know how heavy they might be. Might split it amongst the group for the flights.

Suddenly we’re delivery cyclists, too…

But that’s not all; we’ve got another mission while we’re there: a …

More Celebrations

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[chez geek card]

Yay. Now I’m in a fab bouncey mood and ready to crack on with the next 10,000 words of my dissertation.

People have kindly been offering to proof-read it for me on Sunday night – this is most welcome: if anybody else wants to, you can too: just drop me a comment or a message or something, and I’ll e-mail you it. I presume you’ll all prefer Acrobat .PDFs than PostScript .PS files, yeh?

On which note; everybody’s being really considerate of my need to get this thing done – leaving me to do it where they’re likely to be a distraction; not suggesting really cool things we could be doing right now (except for the above card, ahem), etc. Thank you all, guys!

In other news…

Last Night’s Dream

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[further fragments of this post were recovered on 13 October 2018]

Last night’s dream was somewhat weird. Like so many of mine:

I’m travelling by train with Claire. We’re going to meet a guy who’s going to give us (plus some other folks we know) a desirable-sounding job. Upon getting there, we find that the other people starting work for him include Alec, Bryn, Liz, and some other folks. Our boss is a tech-geek-guru in a wheelchair. His computer is powered by the kinetic energy of people moving around the room, which is cool and environmentally friendly, I guess, but what happens if everybody stands still? Does he have UPS?

Anyway, we begin our on-the-job training. This involves rowing a one-man dinghy across the office (one side of which is half-filled with water – why it doesn’t flood into the other half I don’t know) to answer one of about twenty phones which are arranged in a crescent shape on a curved shelf at the other side. These phones are old, Bakelite, traditional phones (a …

Futurama’s Coming Back

Okay, it’s not certain yet, but Wired News reports that it, and Family Guy (also killed by Fox) will make a comeback on Cartoon Network, with new episodes sponsored by the channel.

Yay. And, indeed, hey.

And in other news, to celebrate the change of name from Lindows to Linspire, Lindows.com are giving away copies of Linspire. All you have to do is try to buy a copy of the BitTorrent ISOs from their online store and enter LINDOWS as a coupon code.

A Demonstration Of The Next Generation Of ‘Phishing’ Attacks

[this post has been partially damaged during a server failure on Sunday 11th July 2004, and it has been possible to recover only a part of it]

[further content was recovered on 13 October 2018]

If you’ve been on the internet for any length of time at all, you’ll probably have come across the concept of a phishing [wikipedia] attack, or even been the target of one. The idea is that Joe Naughty sends you an e-mail, pretending to be your bank, credit card company, or whatever, and when you click the link in the e-mail it takes you to your bank’s web site. Or that’s what you think, anyway. Actually, you’re at Joe Naughty’s web site, and it just looks like your bank’s web site. And so he tries to trick you into giving him your bank details, so he can rob you blind.

I was recently the target of such an attack (one related to the CitiBank browser-bar scam [bbc news]). In this particular attack, the fake site tries to trick you into thinking it is the real site by making your Internet Explorer address bar ‘disappear’, and then replaces it with a picture of an Internet Explorer browser bar saying that you’re on the real site.

I decided that this was a particularly crude hack, and that I could do better. And …

Two Men, Two Bikes, One Wall

After the success of yesterday’s run, today I was exhausted. The weather was horrific, and we found ourselves having to pedal hard to get DOWNhill.

On my account, we had to take several extended breaks, which had us arrive in Stornoway, isle of Lewis, half an hour outside of our target window. I just collasped into bed. In less than 6 hours we’d be on a ferry to Ullapool.

Tried to call Claire, but couldn’t get through. Miss her. Hug her for me, Aberites.

Miles today: 57
Miles total: 170 (+2, wrong turn)

Two Men, Two Bikes, One Wall

You get to your third day of an exercise that your body isn’t used to and you hit the wall: the point at which your body runs out of all it’s immediate sources of energy and has to start the complicated chemical reactions that break down fat into sugars.

You know this has happened because suddenly every muscle in your body starts begging you to curl up into a ball and go to sleep.

For me, this happened half-way up a 700-metre mountain on the island of Harris, on day three. During a hailstorm. And a gale.

Two Men, Two Bikes, Six Islands

Farmer at Berneray warned us that Stornoway, where we’d be tomorrow night, was a bed of sin, with young people drinking at taking drugs (this is a town barely larger, and more isolated, than Aberystwyth). He’d lived his entire life on this tiny island, and knew everybody on it, and it therefore stood to reason that my dad should know everybody in Lancashire. He threw some names of previous guests from Lancs. at him, and asked if he knew them.

Miles today: 72, fast – a good run.
Miles total: 113